Happy Christmas

A one-subject post today since I’m busy, you’re busy, we had a fairly one-subject class and you’re probably not even reading this.

We discussed critical (literature) essays and I tried to impress on you the idea that you must:

* Answer the question (both bits – there are usually two parts)
* Bear in mind that the whole point of the essay is to show HOW the writer has written the text
* Show that you’re doing this by using terms that describe techniques (theme etc)
* Write as fluently and correctly as possible.

Most of what we call “questions” don’t actually have a question in them at all. They’re really arguments – you’re arguing that the author has indeed done what’s mentioned in the description, and showing how he/she has done it.

The “questions” will be in the form:

Description of text: “Choose a novel which is influenced by the presence of a powerful or overbearing character.”
Instruction: “Show how the writer creates the impression of this character and discuss to what extent you felt you could sympathise with him/her.”

And at the top of each section of the exam you’ll also find a little box reminding you to write about the literary techniques.

So you might like to think of the question as if it said:

“Show how (ie by his/her use of theme, language, setting, characterisation) the writer creates the impression of this character and discuss to what extent you felt (through his/her use of theme, characterisation, structure) you could sympathise with him/her.”

You don’t need to discuss all the techniques. You do need to discuss some. But there’s no point in just regurgitating the notes. You need to discuss literary techniques only as far as they’re relevant to the particular argument of the essay.

You can assume that the marker will have read the text, but – as far as the exam is concerned – may have a hazy memory of it, so do tell little bits of the story to make points about them. Don’t tell bits of the story merely to fill up the page.

You MUST quote to back up some of your points. In a exam, five quotes would be the minimum for novels and plays – lots of quotes needed for poems. Using direct evidence (ie things that happen or a paraphrase of what people say) is good too.




While answering these “questions”, it’s useful to keep a little formula in mind and to follow it – not necessarily slavishly and not necessarily in this order, but as a possible approach if you feel yourself waffling off the topic – as is so easy to do:

SECT – this means

Statement – say something about the text
Evidence – give evidence from the text to back up what you say
Comment – say a bit more about your evidence if necessary
Technique – try to link this to a literary technique.

Eg

S. Anne Tyler shows us that Barnaby is unsure about his trustworthiness.
E On the very first page, he mentions that his customers see him as “a man you can trust”, while he himself is not so sure.
C This shows the lack of self esteem which troubles him throughout the novel
T and introduces the theme of trust, which is a central issue.

Certainly a lot of unsupported statements will not gain very many marks.

I then showed you a sample essay on “A Patchwork Planet” and asked you to write in class (how cruel! in the last class before Christmas!) the following essay:

Choose a novel in which a central character’s experiences lead to a deeper understanding not only of others but also of himself or herself.

Discuss the ways in which the character is made to attain self-knowledge and a better understanding of other people.



There’s no homework other than to do this essay if you weren’t there, to redo it if you feel you want to and to raise a glass to the SQA on January 1. Think about Barnaby and his year of change…

If you want the SECT handout, the “PP” notes or the sample essay, please email me: pdonaldson@stevenson.ac.uk

See you on January 6, clutching in your hands a copy of Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and your past papers. Santa will provide, I trust. Hope he brings you lots of other good things too.

The four ages of Santa
1. You believe in Santa
2. You don’t believe in Santa
3. You are Santa.
4. You look like Santa.

Finishing off "A Patchwork Planet"

Tonight we again had a shortened class because of the Textual Analysis reassessment at the beginning. Do remember that next week is the last class before Christmas; we meet again on January 6.

First we looked at a sample essay on “Museé des Beaux Arts” by WH Auden, which I wrote while the reassessment was going on. I’ll have copies available next week. The main thing to remember for any literature essay is to answer the question VERY OBVIOUSLY – which sounds self-evident, but in fact it isn’t so easy to stick to when things get stressful.

We then finished going over “A Patchwork Planet”. In chapter 13, the Gaitlins have a Thanksgiving dinner during which Pop-Pop tells everyone how well they’re doing, including Barnaby: “He’s a good, good boy”. Barnaby is tempted to put his hands on his sister-in-law’s bottom – you should recognise his tendency to do inappropriate things and cause needless offence on social occasions – but is interrupted by his mother, who gives him the money back and tells him how she really felt about having to pay off his burglary victims: totally humiliated because she feels they looked down on her socially. He doesn’t really take this in at the time and tears up the cheque. His mother then tells his father about Barnaby’s refusal to take the money and he once again snubs her – “… your tiresome fishwife act”. What other comment of Father's does this remind you of? Should he have said this?

Sparked off by Sophia’s mentioning her “ne’er-do-well” cousin-in-law, Barnaby produces a huge list of synonyms for scoundrels – presumably because he’s been storing them up in his mind as descriptions of himself. Does he say them as a sort of apology to his mother, maybe? Is he admitting that he was wrong? Or is he just saying that he feels he’s been made to feel like this?

His father tells Pop-Pop about the Corvette. Pop-Pop is shocked but nobly says that the car “was yours to do what you liked with”.

On the way home in the car, Sophia brings up the question of money again – she’s unhappy that he tore up his mother’s cheque, but refuses to discuss the question of her (flour bin) money. All at once, Barnaby finds her irritating: her fluffy face, her bossy hands, her silly voice, her Crock-Pot dinners and general predictability; her lack of curiosity about the passport. This is really the end for their relationship.

There is then a flashback to the circumstances of Pop-Pop’s giving Barnaby the Corvette: after he locked the family out of the house and set fire to the curtains. He gave it because “I can’t think of anyone better, son” – and this act of trust appears to have reformed Barnaby as far as burgling is concerned, anyway. We now see why the car was so important to him.

In chapter 14 Barnaby goes to Mrs Alford’s and finds that she has died. He is shown her patchwork which is “makeshift and haphazard, clumsily cobbled together, overlapping and crowded and likely to fall into pieces at any moment” but also “pretty, in an offbeat, unexpected way”. Since this is the title of the book, we have to assume that Barnaby sees this as a symbol of his life – ramshackle but all right really. (Possibly the same could be said of most of our lives?) Barnaby realises that he has come to value people like Mrs Alford who “keep their good humour and gracious manners”.

He doesn’t invite Sophia to the Gaitlin Christmas dinner and declines his mother’s suggestion that he should give Sophia a family ring, but he and his mother have reached a better understanding and he muses that “it hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me”.

He and Martine are getting on better too and when he tells her about Sophia’s money being in the flour bin, she says, “What: is she out of her mind?” She trusts him completely; in fact it turns out that it was she who alerted Barnaby’s clients to the original accusation so that they asked him to do extra work for them. Martine then takes the initiative to go and collect the money. Mrs Glynn surprises them and Martine, thinking quickly, pretends that she has asked them to come and then forgotten.

Mrs Glynn must have phoned Sophia, because she then phones Barnaby, highly indignant. He puts the phone down – almost without meaning to, “my body proceeding without me again”. You should remember other times when he mentions such tendencies.

He doesn’t invite Sophia to the Gaitlin Christmas dinner and declines his mother’s suggestion that he should give Sophia a family ring, but he and his mother have reached a better understanding and he muses that “it hadn’t been much fun loving someone as thorny as me”.

He and Martine are getting on better too and when he tells her about Sophia’s money being in the flour bin, she says, “What: is she out of her mind?” She trusts him completely; in fact it turns out that it was she who alerted Barnaby’s clients to the original accusation so that they asked him to do extra work for them. Martine then takes the initiative to go and collect the money. Mrs Glynn surprises them and Martine, thinking quickly, pretends that she has asked them to come and then forgotten.

Mrs Glynn must have phoned Sophia, because she then phones Barnaby, highly indignant. He puts the phone down – almost without meaning to, “my body proceeding without me again”. You should remember other times when he mentions such tendencies.

In chapter 15, he takes Sophia’s money to the station (where he knows she’ll be) and gives her a packet for Natalie (which he knows she’ll take) with a piece of paper tucked inside (which is supposed to contain Natalie’s phone number but which is actually a message). This mirrors the station scene at the beginning and shows us the Anne Tyler’s careful structuring of the novel: this last scene wouldn’t work without the first scene having happened.

Then he goes to Mrs Alford’s to help clear up and to collect the Twinform, which Mrs Alford has willed to him. He imagines it (himself?) dressed in a suit – smartly. Is this his future self?

The novel ends just after he unscrews a figure-of-eight mounting plate from the wall. This reminds him of Martine’s dungaree clasps and when she comes in he says (quoting from the Shakespeare sonnet) “Haply I think on thee”. Remember that this means “Perhaps I’m thinking about you” – which suggests that Martine may in fact be the one for him. She seems to understand; on the whole she does understand him (and she trusts him) though she can’t possibly be recognising the quotation. Notice the structuring of the novel, though: the sonnet clue was planted some time ago, though possibly only alert readers would actually realise what happens here.

At the station (Barnaby assumes) Sophia reads the message: “Sophia, you never did realise. I am a man you can trust”. At last he feels sure of this, and doesn’t want the woman in his life to be someone who doesn’t trust him.

I will supply you with copious notes next week, but before then, please write (for homework) some notes of your own on one or two themes of this novel. The ones I suggest are trust, change, money/possessions/class, age and love, but feel free to think of other themes that you feel you could substantiate by textual reference (ie mentioning how the themes emerge in the plot / language).

Sorry this was so long. Reward me by leaving a comment! (You could answer some of the questions or say anything else that occurs to you about the novel. Or tell us a joke.)

Where are you, missing students?

This was quite a short class since those who already have the Textual Analysis assessment left at 8 so that I could do some revision with the others for the assessment next week. Remember that the class proper doesn’t start till 7.30 next week because of the reassessment. Attendance is a bit patchy these days, which is a worry (for me). Also there have been no blog comments! I shall not go on doing this for my own entertainment only, people. I could be watching “Coronation Street”.

We talked about persuasive essays: how the purpose of them is (surprise!) to persuade the reader. They therefore DO have to display logical arguments in a structured way but DON’T (unlike argumentative essays) have to be balanced. They may, or may not, produce some arguments on the other side but if they do, they should do so only to demolish these. The language of a persuasive essay may sometimes be less formal than that of an argumentative one – you’re speaking directly to the reader, appealing with him/her to agree with you – and it may be appropriate therefore to use the word “you”.

Unlike in an argumentative essay, when you shouldn’t harangue the reader (“You shouldn’t get pregnant at eighteen” – this is not going to apply to anyone who’s likely to mark it) you may wish in your persuasive essay to make the reader feel that he/she is being addressed (“You can make a difference to global warming”).

We then looked at chapters 11 and 12 of “A Patchwork Planet”. In chapter 11, Barnaby visits Opal for her birthday, but the present (chosen by Sophia) falls flat and Opal is cold in the park in her party dress, so she goes home again. He has to wait for Sophia to give him a lift home, which gives him time to think about his marriage. He wonders if perhaps he should have stayed with Natalie and she might have “become the right person”. On the way home in the car, he and Sophia have an argument: she wants him to apply for a job at her bank and is clearly unhappy that he doesn’t earn much; especially since she has “lost” her money in her aunt’s flour bin and for some reason won’t go and retrieve it.

In chapter 12, he thinks a lot about the problems brought by old age. Then at Mrs Cartwright’s, he and Martine are turning a mattress and end up standing very close to each other. He hears the clink of her overall clasp (when did he last mention this? – p. 186) and she asks him “How do you get your mouth to turn up at the corners that way?” (How does she feel about mouths? – p. 27). He replies flippantly and changes the subject quickly to not wanting to be late for lunch with Sophia. Martine picks a fight with him on the way home and he – apparently – doesn’t know why.

Of course, Anne Tyler knows why. Never forget that this is a novel. Anne Tyler pulls all the strings.

We then discussed “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen, in which the poet compares death on the battlefield (nothing changes, the guns keep firing, but the dead soldiers’ comrades are sad) to death at home (bells, candles, a white pall cloth over the coffin).

He does this all the way through the sonnet, at first in alternate lines and then both in one line, in a very compressed way. There’s metaphor, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme, regular rhythm, interesting word choice and a very clear structure.

Critical essays and Barnaby again

First of all, I gave back the Textual Analysis assessments, which most people passed. I’ve now decided to delay the reassessment for one week, so it’ll be on 2 December. Next week, therefore, I’m going to finish the class at 8 for those who passed and spend the later part of the lesson doing some intensive revision with those who didn’t quite pass. Then on 2 December, class will begin at 7.30 pm for those who don’t need to resit.

We then considered poetry as a subject for a critical ( ie literature) essay in the exam. I said – because it’s certainly true for me – that it’s easier to learn a poem and (more or less) everything there is to say about it than it is to do the same for a novel. To that extent, it’s easier to write about a poem in the exam than about a novel or a play. For novels and plays, you must – while sitting in the exam room - select extracts and aspects to write about which are relevant to the question. For poems, assuming that the poem is relevant to the question, you’re writing about the whole poem – or most of it – so the selection process is largely avoided.

The downside of this is that while the novel and play questions are usually fairly general (“Choose a novel where the main character learns something about himself” – this is the case in almost all novels), the poetry questions are much more specific (“Choose a poem about an animal” or “Choose a poem with a sinister tone”). This means that you’re very likely indeed to get a novel and play question that you can answer but you're much less likely to get a poetry question that’s appropriate to any one poem.

If you do get such a question, however, then (in my opinion) poetry questions are easier - for the above reasons.

We looked at the poem “Museé des Beaux Arts” (the Museum of Beautiful Arts) by W H Auden, which is partly about the painting of Icarus by Brueghel,/Bruegel / Breughel (variously spelt) in this museum in Paris. I then gave you an exemplar of an essay on the subject of a poem which showed contrast.

In “A Patchwork Planet”, we just had time to look at chapter 10, in which Barnaby sells the car to Len Parrish and hands over the money to his mother. He’s very reluctant in the end to let the car go, which shows us its importance to him. To his disappointment, the handover of the money falls flat: his mother is suspicious as to where he got it and his father is shocked that he has sold the Corvette.

Then the reader finds out that Mrs Glynn has found the money that she thought was stolen – she’s just misplaced it. Barnaby is very forgiving, but Sophia seems surprisingly upset. It turns out that she has withdrawn her savings and put them in the flour bin to protect Barnaby.

He immediately realises that this seems to be proof that she really thought he’d stolen the money, but he’s disarmed by Sophia’s reference to the O Henry (above) story in which a young married couple each secretly sell their most prized possessions (the girl’s long, beautiful hair and the man’s pocket watch) to buy presents for each other (a clasp for her hair and a chain for his watch). Sophia likens this to her pointless sacrifice of her savings, and Barnaby is distracted from her obvious lack of trust in him by the romantic way she puts this: “You are your gift to me, Barnaby”.

Is anybody reading this, by the way? Comments would be good, as proof!

The first blog entry

It’s impossible to make a brief blog entry which covers the past 10 weeks, but if I had to sum up in four words the advice I’ve been trying to give you about passing Higher English, these would be the words: you need to ANALYSE.

Paste this up on the ceiling above your bed, write it in plastic letters on the fridge and if necessary tattoo it on the back of your writing hand. (You may do this metaphorically if you prefer.)

Waffling is out. It’s a myth that this is what English teachers want their students to do. Analysing is in, giving evidence from the text to justify what you say.

This goes both for the language and for the literature parts of the exam (and for the assessments, apart from the expressive essay). You’ve got to show HOW the writers do what they’re doing: HOW they show character, make their writing emotive, structure their novel/play/poem and so on.

This week we looked at argumentative essays and particularly at their structure. Fairly obviously, you should move logically from one stage in your argument to the next, sometimes using linking words and phrases such as “similarly… furthermore…. however….” to show the connection between one paragraph and the next. Your homework is to write an argumentative essay, which by SQA definition shows both sides of an argument in a fairly balanced way.

At the beginning of chapter 9 of "A Patchwork Planet" there's an abrupt turning point in Barnaby's fortunes when Sophia's aunt accuses him of theft.He's terrified when a policeman comes to interview him - he presumably thinks that his past record may count against him.We noticed his childish reactions to this unfair accusation. (What are they?)

However, Martine persuades him to come out to work and tells him her plan that he should sell the Corvette and buy Everett's truck with her.

And then, apparently to Barnaby's surprise, they start kissing and end up in bed together.

Afterwards, Barnaby remembers an occasion when he was married to Natalie and she was angry at him for being late home when - for once - it wasn't his fault. His attitude then was, "If you think I'm such a villain, just watch: I'll act worse than you ever dreamed of." (What is the relevance to his current situation?)

The chapter ends wonderfully well, with Mrs Dibble telling him that all his clients support him and that she wants him to buy the business from her when she retires. He then contacts Sophia to apologise for... not returning her calls. At the end of the chapter, rather like at the end of the previous one, he feels that "I really might have moved on in my life". So this turning point in the structure seems to have been reversed and he's on course again.

In a big rush as usual at the end, we looked at the rest of the first “Paranoid Parenting” Close Reading and will tackle the remaining questions next week in class.

Do look at this website, which has an interview with Anne Tyler about "A Patchwork Planet": http://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm?author_number=313

(Sorry that some of these paragraphs have no space between them. I can't persuade these spaces to occur. Please imagine them.)